Aaron Brooks danced about the middle of the floor, his red-hot right hand raised and held above his head as the 18,313 at Toyota Center roared at levels they have rarely reached before.

Brooks had just thrown himself hard to the court in pursuit of a loose ball, tearing it away from Trevor Ariza before getting up to nail a 3-pointer for a 27-point Rockets lead that inspired even Phil Jackson to halt things with a timeout, the only way the Lakers could stop the Rockets all afternoon.

Reeling hours earlier from the loss of center Yao Ming for the season, the Rockets took it out on the Lakers, dominating the game from the start to take a stunning 99-87 win to send the Western Conference semifinals back to Los Angeles tied two games apiece.

“We will never count ourselves out,” Brooks said. “If anybody is ready for us, it would be us. We’ve been through a lot this year. Mac (Tracy McGrady) being out, Deke (Dikembe Mutombo) being out, Shane (Battier) being out at the beginning of the year. Now we have Yao out. It seems like we keep going. We’re used to it.”

This was in many ways typical of a season in which the Rockets’ greatest, most reliable quality has been their resilience. They have gone 4-2 in games without Yao this season, have won their past four games playing without Yao and McGrady, and are 4-0 against the Lakers when playing without Yao.

“I knew we could win, but I knew we would have to play the way we did,” Luis Scola said. “I like my team. I like Yao a lot, too, but we have pretty good players. If you ask me, I will choose to play with Yao 100 percent of the time. But since that is not possible, we have different things to use.”

They used them all, with everyone who played scoring in key stretches. But with the league’s tallest player out, the game’s smallest took over. Brooks finished with 34 points, his career high for a playoff or regular-season game. But though his most giddy celebration came with the third-quarter 3-pointer in the run that took command of the game, it was not his most spectacular basket.

In spectacular fashion

The transformation from the Rockets’ struggles to score in Game 3 to their spectacular flight through Game 4 was complete when Brooks ended the third quarter 24 feet closer to the rim than his previous basket.

Inbounding with seven-tenths of a second left in the quarter, Ron Artest threw an alley-oop from beyond midcourt. Brooks got behind Jordan Farmar to leap high for the pass and put it in off the backboard just ahead of the buzzer.

“As a team, we just wanted to be more aggressive,” Brooks, wearing a matching bright red bow tie and jacket he was tricked into wearing, said. “Without Yao in there, the paint was going to open up a little bit more. We just wanted to get into the middle, and we hit a lot of 3s.

“It all started with Shane. He came out and gave us a spark, and defensively he did his thing. That’s the heart of the team right there.”

From the opening seconds, the Rockets hit the Lakers with everything they had left. They needed 16 seconds before Artest scored on a steal and a break, they scored the first nine points of the game, and with 3½ minutes left in the first quarter, they had built a 17-point lead.

“It was very important,” Rockets coach Rick Adelman said of the fast start. “You can’t underestimate when we heard the news about Yao; it was a pretty big blow to the team. These guys responded. Yesterday, we talked about him being out for today. We got prepared yesterday. ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to attack them?’”

Kobe who?

They spread the floor and moved the ball so well, they had Battier drilling so many 3s he might have been tempted to repeat Kobe Bryant’s Game 2 taunt, “You can’t guard me.” Battier had 12 points in that tone-setting first quarter. He finished with a career playoff-high 23 while helping to hold Bryant to 15 on 7-of-17 shooting.

They had Brooks and Kyle Lowry (who had his career playoff high with 12 points, often playing in a small backcourt with Brooks) scoring inside and out. And they had Chuck Hayes making up for much of the loss of Yao with his defense on Pau Gasol and some sensational pick-and-roll defense on Bryant, who grew so annoyed with the events, he barked his way to a technical foul. “They shot the ball extremely well to start the game, and that put us in a hole,” Bryant said. “We couldn’t recover from it.”

Too little, too late for L.A.

Before the Lakers could mount any sort of second-half rally, Brooks took over. He made six of seven shots, scoring 17 of the Rockets’ 29 points in the quarter.

That sent the game to the fourth quarter with the Rockets leading by 29, with Lamar Odom out with back spasms and the Lakers forced to trap the ball out of Brooks’ hands.

The Lakers finally made a move and were within 10 in the last minute. But Brooks and Battier combined to go 6- of-6 from the line to complete the win. And a day that began about who could not play was taken over by the determination of those who did.

“The energy level was through the roof,” Lowry said. “We got the crowd into the game and just played all the way through. Everybody was telling us they would count us out, but we played for each other.

“This team, we’re just resilient. We have that grit and grind. We don’t want to ever lose.”

That was — as usual — never truer than on a day so many assumed they would.